r
precious. In a word, every man in love shows better than he is, though,
thank God, not better than he is meant to become.

After Kate's departure, Alec's health improved much more rapidly. Hope,
supplied by his own heart, was the sunlight in which he revived. He had
one advantage over some lovers--that he was no metaphysician. He did
not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to
his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and
dumb and blind, but it has more in it--more life and blessedness, more
torture and death--than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can
understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding.

From the first, Kate's presence had not been favourable to his
recovery, irrespectively of the excitement and restlessness which it
occasioned; for she was an absorbent rather than a diffuser of life.
Her own unsatisfied nature, her excitableness, her openness to all
influences from the external world, and her incapacity for supplying
her needs in any approximate degree from inward resources; her
consequent changeableness, moodiness, and dependency--were all
unfavourable influences upon an invalid who loved her.

The first thing he did was to superintend the painting and laying up of
his boat for the winter. It was placed across the rafters of the barn,
wrapt in tarpaulin.

The light grew shorter and shorter. A few rough rainy days stripped the
trees of their foliage; and although the sun shone out again and made
lovely weather,

Saint Martin's summer, halcyon days,

it was plain to all the senses that the autumn was drawing to a close.

CHAPTER LX.

All the prophetic rumours of a bad harvest had proved themselves false.
Never a better harvest had been gathered in the strath, nor had one
ever been carried home in superior condition. But the passion for
prophecy had not abated in Glamerton. It was a spiritual epidemic over
the whole district.

Now a certain wily pedler had turned the matter over and resolved to
make something of it.

One day there appeared in the streets of Glamerton a man carrying in
his hand a bundle of papers as a sample of what he had in the pack upon
his shoulders. He bore a burden of wrath. They were all hymns and
ballads of a minacious description, now one and now another of which he
kept repeating in lugubrious recitative. Amongst them some of Watts's,
quite unknown to Glamerton worshippers, carried t